S.F. MAYOR'S RACE: THE STRETCH RUN / About as opposite as they can be / Newsom, Gonzalez disagree on almost every major issue

Mark Simon, Rachel Gordon, Chronicle Staff Writers

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, November 30, 2003

Matt Gonzalez and Gavin Newsom, the two San Francisco supervisors running to become the city's next mayor, have pushed radically different legislative agendas that provide a clear picture of the stakes in the Dec. 9 election.

From taxation to homelessness, to police oversight, to municipalization of electricity service, to the balancing of tenant and landlord rights and beyond, Gonzalez and Newsom differed.

Though there were exceptions, a Chronicle review of hundreds of City Hall votes and proposals shows Newsom generally sided with pro-growth business and labor interests, developers and property owners.

Gonzalez, for the most part, lined up with renters, the working poor and advocates for new regulations to control commercial development.

Newsom, appointed supervisor in 1997 by Mayor Willie Brown and thrice re- elected, made his mark foremost on the direction of city homeless policy, with rider-backed reforms of the Municipal Railway transit agency and increased funding for parks.

"What matters is accomplishments, not rhetoric," Newsom said in a recent interview. "The whole idea of entering politics is to accomplish things, to produce results and to move people to unite around those ideas in a way that gets the majority of people feeling there's a better way to produce results."

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Gonzalez, elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2000 as part of a new anti-Brown majority, took the lead on measures to shift political authority away from the mayor's office toward the 11 district supervisors.

The intent, says board President Gonzalez, is to put the levers of government closer to the hands of residents. "One of the things that happens is that people get political power and they try to get patronage and protect themselves for their own political longevity. They're not serving the interests of the people," he said.

Newsom and Gonzalez have clashed over fiscal policy -- particularly over taxation during a period of declining revenue and budget cutting brought on by the dot-com bust of 2000.

In April 2001, with City Hall's financial outlook darkening due to the state's energy crisis, the board was asked by then-City Attorney Louise Renne to absorb another blow -- an $80 million payout to settle a lawsuit challenging San Francisco's business tax system.

Filed on behalf of several hundred companies, including Chevron, Charles Schwab and the Hearst Corp., owner of The Chronicle, the lawsuit claimed that the tax system, which required businesses to pay the higher of either a gross receipts or payroll-based levy, was illegal because it resulted in unequal treatment.

In addition to the payout, the settlement would do away with a dual tax system in favor of one based solely on company payroll and would generate an estimated $30 million a year less in local government revenue.

Gonzalez, a lawyer, voted against the settlement, arguing that the city could win at trial or at least wind up paying less.

Newsom, an entrepreneur who formed a group of wine, restaurant, bar and resort companies, was excused from voting because he did business with some of the plaintiffs in the case.

The final vote was 7-3 in favor of the settlement.

The next year, Gonzalez sponsored a ballot measure to double the transfer tax on real estate sales above $1 million -- a proposal he said was aimed at replacing some of the revenue lost as a result of the business tax settlement.

Newsom opposed the tax increase, Proposition L on the November 2002 ballot, and placed an argument against it in the city's official election guide, saying it would "hurt small businesses and working families."

Instead, Newsom stated, "San Francisco should focus on cutting costs in government rather than running business and business owners out of town."

Behind a well-financed campaign, Newsom and the business and real estate interests who organized against Prop. L prevailed, as voters rejected it by a 55 percent to 45 percent margin.

On the spending side of the City Hall ledger, Gonzalez of late has played the fiscal moderate on a vote that has opened him up to being labeled stingy on public education.

Earlier this year, Gonzalez voted against placing a City Charter amendment on the March ballot that would guarantee $60 million a year in new city funding to arts, library, and preschool programs run by the San Francisco Unified School District.

The 58,000-student, largely state-funded school district -- with an annual budget of about $650 million -- now receives $8 million a year in city funding.

Newsom backed the school funding amendment, which was authored by Supervisor Tom Ammiano, himself a mayoral candidate at the time, who finished fourth in the Nov. 4 general election.

Gonzalez explained his vote by saying he never received a sound explanation of how Ammiano arrived at the $60 million figure and said he believed it wasn't prudent to pledge so much support given the city's current fiscal straits. In order to balance the city's current budget, the mayor and the board closed a projected $349 million deficit through wage concessions, other cuts and fee hikes.

"I've never heard anyone cogently explain why it was $60 million and not $80 million," Gonzalez said of the Ammiano proposal. "What if it had been $200 million?"

Instead, Gonzalez said, he would support increasing city funding to schools by $4 million a year until it reaches $20 million annually.

Newsom and Gonzalez also are at odds on what has become Newsom's signature issue -- homeless policy.

In the November 2002 election in which voters defeated Gonzalez's real estate transfer tax hike, they also passed, by 59 percent to 41 percent, Newsom's controversial "Care Not Cash" homeless aid reform, which appeared on the ballot as Proposition N.

Gonzalez opposed Prop. N, which would have cut general assistance cash grants to homeless people receiving shelter, food and other services, then placed the money back into homeless aid programs.

After a San Francisco judge ruled that only the Board of Supervisors -- not voters -- could set general assistance aid rules, Gonzalez voted against a Newsom ordinance to implement his Care Not Cash measure.

Gonzalez voted in favor of a Care Not Cash alternative, crafted by his board ally, Supervisor Chris Daly. It prevents a reduction of cash aid to homeless general assistance recipients until they've been offered housing rather than a bed in a temporary shelter.

Police officer oversight was another point of departure for the two local lawmakers.

Gonzalez voted in favor -- and Newsom against -- of placing on the ballot a measure to give the civilian Office of Citizen Complaints more authority to prosecute suspected police misconduct and the supervisors new power on appointments to the Police Commission, the body that governs the police department.

Approved by voters 52 percent to 48 percent, the measure, Proposition H, expands the commission from five to seven members, with the mayor getting four picks and the board three. The board, however, gets authority to reject the mayor's appointees. Before, the mayor had exclusive appointment power.

It was the shifting of appointment power from the mayor to the supervisors to which Newsom said he objected.

While disagreeing over how appointment power is apportioned, Gonzalez and Newsom didn't see eye-to-eye on electrical power, either.

In 2002, Gonzalez sponsored a ballot measure to give San Francisco the financing authority to replace Pacific Gas and Electric Co. as the supplier and distributor of electricity in San Francisco if it made economic sense and wouldn't drive up rates. Newsom opposed it.

The measure, Proposition D, was rejected after PG&E spent $2.1 million on a media campaign against it.

Another long-running theme of city politics is the tension between tenants and landlords, which has played out in battles over rent control, conversion of apartment buildings into condominiums and sharing of tax levies stemming from the issuance of city bonds.

A renter himself, Gonzalez pushed several proposals to expand the rights of tenants within the city's rent-control system, though few have been enacted into law.

Newsom, a property owner whose holdings until recently included a small interest in a residential rental building, has either opposed most of Gonzalez's proposals or recused himself from voting, citing a potential conflict of interest.

One telling vote came July 9, 2001, when Newsom sided with the mayor as the board voted 8-3 to override Brown's veto of legislation putting tight restrictions on a popular form of homeownership for first-time buyers. Gonzalez voted to override the veto.

The legislation placed new limits on tenancies in common, a real estate transaction in which a group of people buy and occupy a multiunit building.

The transactions, in which buildings are converted from rental to owner- occupied, had resulted in hundreds of evictions, but also represented one of the few affordable ways for people -- many of them tenants -- to buy a home in a city where the price of a condominium or single-family house may be out of reach.

"A lot of working-class, a lot of middle-class families in San Francisco are being displaced -- you know that, I don't need to lecture on that point -- those are the people we are talking about here who will not be able to achieve that American Dream because fundamentally this first-time homeownership opportunity will have been restricted significantly," Newsom said at the time.

Gonzalez had a different take. "We say homeownership. I say at what cost? We say the American Dream. At what cost? We talk about working-class people, about giving them an opportunity to buy and stay in this city. Well, what about the working-class people that get evicted? That is fundamentally what this is about," he said.

Gonzalez had the working class in mind when he sponsored a Nov. 4 ballot measure passed by voters to raise the minimum wage in San Francisco to $8.50 an hour, the highest in the state.

Newsom supported an exception for restaurants to allow them to count tips as paid income. When Gonzalez rejected it, Newsom nevertheless endorsed the wage hike.

The minimum wage measure followed by a year a Gonzalez-backed Charter amendment to make the job of supervisor full time. It resulted in supervisors' annual pay being raised from $37,585 to $112,320.

Newsom has his own initiatives on behalf of the working poor. In 2001, for example, he pushed through new fire safety requirements for residential hotels generally occupied by the city's poorest residents.

The legislation, which followed a series of fires that hit 11 hotels, killing three people and destroying 840 rooms, required sprinklers to be installed in buildings with 20 or more guest rooms or three stories or more.

Newsom can claim to be the board's champion of public parks. In 2000, he took the lead on two voter-approved ballot measures -- a $110 million bond to pay for improvements, such as new play structures and field drainage systems, and a 30-year extension of the open space program, which provides funding acquisition of new parkland.

Meanwhile, Gonzalez can take credit for giving neighborhoods more say in the direction of city development policy by spearheading a 2001 Charter change

-- approved by voters -- that gave supervisors a share in appointments to the city Planning Commission and Board of Appeals.

He also has proposed legislation to restrict "big box" retail outlets and chain stores -- proposals close to the hearts of many local, independent retailers.

For his part, Newsom has given commercial developers wider rein. In 2000, he opposed a moratorium on dot.com office development in the Mission District, Potrero and other South of Market neighborhoods.

Rich DeLeon, a political science professor at San Francisco State University and a longtime observer of city politics, said there is a "progressive agenda" and Gonzalez is its standard-bearer.

Gonzalez seems more in favor of things like growth control and neighborhood control over planning, DeLeon said, and is likely "to tap the business community to provide a bigger share of city expenses."

Newsom, he said, "is more protective toward the business community and they're supporting him. The business community puts its money where its mouth and its expectations are."

POLITICAL SYMBOLISM

While Matt Gonzalez and Gavin Newsom have approached the official duties of a San Francisco supervisor with different philosophies, their symbolic gestures -- resolutions to commend or honor a person or organization -- make equally varied statements about each supervisor's priorities. Here is a sampling of some resolutions that Gonzalez and Newsom have authored. Some passed, some failed and some just faded away.

GONZALEZ

-- Resolutions commending three poets, two public defenders and the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the ad hoc gathering of Americans who fought against fascism and Francisco Franco in the 1930s.

-- Commended Dave Snyder for 11 years of service to the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

-- Urged the creation of a San Francisco Artist Laureate/Artists in Residence Program.

-- Commended Armando Miranda for his "extraordinarily considerate, compassionate and thorough work" as a deputy public defender for the San Francisco Drug Court.

-- Proclaimed March 18, 2003, as Gideon Day, in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision mandating the right to counsel for all regardless of income.

-- Commended John Sinclair, poet, activist and rock band manager who served 10 years in prison for possession of marijuana and was a founder of the White Panther Party..

NEWSOM

-- A resolution to thank Colin Powell, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, for headlining a fund-raiser for local youth programs drew the objections of board members, who noted Powell's opposition to the open admission of gays into the military.

-- Urged U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum to step down and apologize for comments equating homosexuality with incest.

-- Honored two high school basketball teams and commended community organizations from Little Sisters of the Poor to Japanese Community Youth Council.